


Evergreen

by gardnerhill



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, Body Horror, Buried Alive, Community: watsons_woes, Gen, Horror, Prompt Fic, Story: The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, Undeath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-16 17:31:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10576086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: There’s signs of life in a friendless, drifting woman after all.





	

When Holmes received a telegram from Lausanne his entire body seemed come to attention. “An update about the Carfax case, Watson.”

 

I shuddered. Both Holmes and I had endured nightmares about live interment after the end of that sordid business – made all the bitterer for the escape of the two human monsters, cloaked as pious missionaries, who’d kidnapped Lady Frances and nearly murdered her in a horrible manner over her few jewels.

 

When I thought of what might be contained in the telegram, my heart sank. Surely the worst had happened.

 

When we’d pulled open the coffin lid amid the stench of chloroform fumes and brought out Lady Frances she was barely clinging to a breath of life after her drugging and suffocation – it had taken many drastic measures over her body before we could even be sure that she remained in the land of the living. She had still not fully recovered at the close of the case. The Honourable Phillip Green, who had pursued Lady Frances over several continents, had hoped that familiar sights would help restore Lady Frances to rights, and had travelled with his invalid companion back to Switzerland.

 

Green, a rough young man who’d passionately courted Lady Frances Carfax over her objections, and whom I’d first suspected of foul play in her disappearance, now had sole custody of her. Despite my vague feeling of unease at leaving the unfortunate woman’s fate in the hands of a man with whom the hale and healthy Lady Frances had wanted nothing to do – I had recalled mention of a faithful old nurse, Susan Dobney of Camberwell – we left the situation as it was, for there was little else we could do. Holmes was far more interested in pursuing her abductors than in pursuing inquiries about the woman’s fate now that the case was over.

 

And now, perhaps, the case was truly over.

 

I walked over to my friend. He always took it badly when the work ended on such a sour note. “Has the lady died, then?”

 

“Quite the opposite.” Holmes sounded as stunned as his body looked as he presented the telegram to me.

 

RECOVERING WITH EXCELLENT APPETITE STOP MR GREENS PRESENCE VERY WELCOME STOP INTERESTED IN PURSUING SHLESSINGERS STOP RSVP MR HOLMES FULL STOP FC

 

“But this is wonderful news!” I cried. My heart quite leaped in my breast at this sign, not just of mere life but spirit, in our unfortunate client. “She sounds very hale and well indeed – well and spirited enough to engage you in catching her abductors. Do you plan to accept her offer?”

 

“Indeed I am – if only to satisfy my curiosity on her resurrection.” He looked up at me.

 

“My bag will be packed in five minutes,” said I.

 

Holmes said nothing in return, but pulled a telegram form over and began scribbling a response as I headed to my room. I knew the man. A telegram or two would have set Lady Frances on the right path to track down Holy Peters and Miss Fraser; we need not leave the comfort of Baker Street. But he, as well as I, badly needed to see a sight that would banish nightmares involving a pine lid an inch from one’s nose and the thump of soil muffling the top.

 

***

 

The spa at Lausanne was as magnificent-looking as before, but again I was too preoccupied with our impending business to appreciate it.

 

At the hotel desk the clerk recognised us from our last appearance and reassured us that we would be welcomed by both “ _la dame anglais et son … ami._ ” The clerk’s moue at the word “friend” made my unease at our having left Lady Frances to the mercies of the obsessed Mr. Green far greater. Holmes and I headed to the suite of rooms engaged by the pair.

 

“I heard his emphasis too, Watson,” Holmes muttered _sotto voce_. “Perhaps I placed too much trust in Mr. Green’s version of the facts.”

 

“Perhaps, also, the lady is engaging you to deal with a menace a good deal closer to home than Holy Peters,” I muttered back.

 

“My dear chap, I feel obliged to remind you that firearms are not considered proper gentlemen’s _accoutrement_ at this spa.”

 

I patted my pocket. “Then it’s a good thing I am a ruffian and no gentleman.”

 

“I thought I knew my Watson. _Merci_ ,” Holmes said aloud to the bellhop and waved him away with a franc for the delighted lad. He and I shared a look, and turned the doorknob.

 

Lady Frances Carfax arose to greet us arrayed in a splendid dress appropriate for her age, a smile on her face. “Gentlemen. Please come in!”

 

How do I describe how the lady looked? To be perfectly blunt, then: she appeared to be dead. But this was a look of death in the precise way that would show off the skills of an excellent embalmer. She looked like a still-handsome woman of her forties, white-faced and eyes just a little sunken, and by rights such looks should have accompanied her lying in a coffin. Her smile was a little too broad for comfort, as if made merely to show off the full array of her perfect teeth than to express pleasure.

 

But it is the memory of the smell which brings me back to that room in my dreams. She was perfumed with lily-of-the-valley, which did not conceal a stench that by rights belonged to a week-old corpse. I almost expected to hear the whine of blowflies. Yet aside from the sunken eyes and white face her body evinced no decay – no bloating nor putrid flesh that would be the natural accompaniments to that odour.

 

Her voice was mellifluous and cultured, clearly that of a patrician woman who knew her place in the world, and she sounded pleased to see us. “Mr. Holmes. Dr. Watson.” She smiled again, and I only just refrained from crossing myself at her rictus. “You must be famished from your travel here. I’ll send for tea.” She turned toward the suite’s door and raised her voice a little – still lovely and cultured where I kept expecting to hear a ghoul’s cackle. “Mr. Green! Our guests are here!”

 

“Lady Frances.” My friend’s sterling powers of acting and his iron resolve gave his tone the same professional mien he assumed with all his clients; only I saw his white knuckles and his rigidly-clenched jaw in between his courteous words. “Dr. Watson and I were surprised to receive your message.”

 

“I recovered from my ordeal,” said the lady, and her breath also brought to mind the air of a freshly-opened tomb. “Sadly, I did not do so without retaining some unfortunate side-effects – either from the incident or from the remedies worked upon my person.”

 

Injected ether. Oh dear God, why had I suggested that drastic measure as a restorative?

 

“I was in a terrible state for days after that.” She smiled and cocked her head coquettishly. “Dear Mr. Green never left my side. He told me over and over that I lived now solely through his efforts and that I owed all to him, and a true lady knew how to express her gratitude to a gentleman.”

 

I clenched my teeth. I remembered Bob Carruthers’ possessive passion for Miss Violet Smith that had kept the young governess in peril and nearly forcibly married off to a brute. We should never have left this poor woman alone with the obsessed Green. 

 

“Alas, I relapsed. But Mr. Green knew exactly what to give me to restore me to wellness again. Ah, here is my benefactor at last!”

 

The door opened and the Honourable Phillip Green entered the room. Or as I should say, the remains of the Honourable Phillip Green stumbled into the room.

 

The shuffling, staring creature before us did indeed bear the same facial features as the wild young man who’d chased Lady Frances over several continents. This Green, however, stared straight ahead without a single flicker of light in his eyes; they looked deader than Lady Frances’ slightly sunken ones. His jaw gaped open like a corpse’s. Unlike the lady, Green was beset by a whining horde of corpse-flies that flew about his head like bees surrounding a honey-robbing bear. And when the unspeakable, non-speaking creature turned to close the door behind him, Holmes and I could see a great gaping hole in the back of his head.

 

“It was all his fault, truly,” Lady Frances smiled at her co-habitant. “The dear fellow had turned his back on me while I was weakest, and all I could think of was that succulent brain beneath that handsome skull of his. I’m afraid I cracked him open with my teeth as if I were a street-child opening a walnut. Hunger does make one rather a savage, does it not? But I felt _so_ much better after I’d eaten.”

 

I am quite sure that Holmes and I only retained one thought between us at this point and that was the plain raw desire to escape the room alive and never return.

 

“That was when I turned the corner and truly recuperated.” The lady patted the divan beside her and the walking cadaver stumbled over to sit beside her, staring straight ahead with his corpse-gape. “Mr. Green has been generously feeding me from then on, and I am nearly myself again.” She rested a hand on Green’s forearm. “Now I only require one thing more to regain my full equilibrium after my ordeal, Mr. Holmes.”

 

“Your telegram mentioned the Schlessingers.” How Sherlock Holmes managed to maintain his level voice instead of shrieking or gibbering in horror is a mystery to me.

 

“They seem to have escaped the clutches of the law.” Lady Frances Carfax grinned once again. “I wish to engage your services, Mr. Holmes – at your usual rate of payment, of course – to find them.”

 

A maggot inched out of Green’s nostril.

 

“Lady Frances.” Now I recognised my friend’s level voice for the same one I’d used amid men’s shrieks and cannon’s booms on a field of horror. “I wished to witness your recovery in person, and now that I have done so I can give you my answer in the same way. I regret that my current slate of cases prevents me from assisting you in this one.”

 

“A pity.” Lady Frances smiled at Holmes, the closed-mouth smile of a corpse lying in state. “I should have so loved to have seen that great brain of yours in action.” Her tongue came out to wet her lips for a second.

 

Holmes sat rigid as a corpse himself.

 

Oddly, I was the one who could still think, and it was because my love of the stories my gran told me as a child meant I recognised what we faced where Holmes’ precise, rational mind was lost. Beheading was the traditional method of dealing with such creatures, but a bullet to the skull might achieve the same end. One trigger-squeeze and –

 

“No matter,” the resurrected lady said, with a little laugh that showed all her teeth. “I shall simply find them myself, and see that justice is done. And I might just give them a piece of my mind first!”

 

My thumb uncocked my revolver, and I removed my hand from my pocket as I stood. My own voice was the same level-under-fire tone as Holmes’ as I said “Again, our deepest regrets, Lady Frances.” Holmes stood also, his knees admirably still.

 

She offered her hand and I took the icy thing; I felt no pulse as I bowed over it. Holmes and I left Frances and her … companion still sitting on the divan in their Lausanne rooms; we kept our fronts toward her smiling face and Green’s blank corpse-stare as we backed toward the door.

 

Once the door was closed between us and what lay within, by unspoken agreement we walked slowly and wordlessly toward the stairs. In the same stillness we left the hotel and hailed a cab for the station.

 

Only when we were on a train and well on our way back to dear old England – and glad indeed of the train’s rocking motion to hide our trembling – did Holmes break the silence. “I almost pity Holy Peters and Miss Fraser.”

 

The same thing that had taken my unarmed hand out of my pocket opened my mouth. “They kidnapped a decent woman, held her captive, and then buried her alive simply to gain her few miserable baubles. They created what Lady Frances is now, Holmes. Let them, like Dr. Victor Frankenstein, deal with what they hath wrought.”

 

Holmes nodded, then gave a little breathless laugh. “I cannot say that Mr. Green’s fate weighs very heavily upon my conscience either. That stray chicken has become an eagle.”

 

I matched his pitiless rictus-grin with my own. We were of the same mind on the subject. “And eagles eat foxes.”

**Author's Note:**

> For the April 2017 Watson's Woes Monthly Prompt, “Resurrection”


End file.
